One of the great things about diaspora is the fact you get different view points on many subjects. I was reading one article and found a link to a documentary on Iranian Engineers helping out a village in Kenya with their water supply issues.

The short video documentary called veins of life follows the engineers as they equip a village so that they can get fresh water. The site for this is http://presstvdoc.com/ which seems to be the documentary section of presstv.

One of the things about this is they are IRANIANS. If you listen / watch mainstream media you get the impression that Iran is backwards, violent and ruled by a regime that is obsessed with developing nuclear weapons. Hardly a country that would help out its neighbours in this way. As usual the TRUTH is the opposite to what we are fed by the media.

On observation :

What is also noticeable about this village is that the children in the village look so HAPPY, they don’t have TV, radio, internet, social media, or I guess mobile phones, and yet they are HAPPY. Maybe given the number of young people who are currently suffering mental illness, and that is partly attributed to pressures we are putting them under, you must get XYZ grades, you MUST use social media, or wear certain clothes to fit in with everyone else or end up being cast on some sort of scrapheap for not fitting in. We have plenty of evidence from asking young people that shows they are very unhappy.

A few months ago I started using a social network called Diaspora, this has been around for a few users and is gaining popularity world wide. What is different about Diaspora is that unlike other social networks all user data is not stored in a central location. With diaspora there are many servers (called pods) spread around the world. As Diaspora uses free software then people are free to set up their own servers and maintain fully control over how their particular pod works, from services offered to which other social networks to integrate with.

Diaspora respects user privacy if you don’t want to disclose where you live, age or other irrelevant information you don’t need to, As community details such as how old you are, are not needed when we have common interests such as the environment, computing, photography to name a few.

You can create posts in a similar way as you would with other networks, however you can share these posts either publicly, or with specific people, so if your post something about Rugby, you can post that information just to people who are interested in Rugby, this works through the use of aspects, denoted with, a # so in this case #rugby posts would be picked up by anyone following that aspect. Similarly you can share family updates just with family members. You can of course share your posts with social networks too but you do this on a post by post basis. You can also reshape posts and mention other users so you can include others in your posts too.

Diaspora growing and developing, there is an active developer community so if you have web skills and especially Ruby / Ruby on Rails then you can develop your own features, fix others or help in other ways. This could be good if you are learning new programming languages as it gives you real world experience. This is then recognised by peers and the benefits of being part of the Free and Open Source developer communities are well known and documented.

The nice thing too about diaspora is NO advertising, partly as the are not endless algorithms to scan posts for information. I can also upload pictures without having to go through another page to tag things.

I have added some more LEDs to this project so it is now has 10 LEDs in two rows.

And with LEDs turned on

Despite the image suggesting the contrary, all the LEDs are pretty much the same brightness. I would suspect however that as the 4 new LEDs are from the newer batch from banggood their specifications maybe slightly different.

Either way as a basic LED Night vision lamp this seems to work nicely.

Specifically if you scroll down to the section that says 4 answers, the first one has a rating of 12 *

following the instructions has fixed the issue.

From a techy perspective I can cope with this fix. However from a non techie viewpoint aka average user they SHOULD NOT have to do this. Anyway there is a fix here at least. Perhaps this can be installed by default, or that fix can be added to a install script for Libreoffice under mint.

The capacitor is a 16 or 25v 220 uf, as per circuit diagram, the LM386 is documented online so there is no need to go in to deep technical details here.

One advantage in doing this is that the circuit allows for a potentiometer (10k) for a volume control so if this circuit is linked to the diy speakers, it adds a volume control, also as the speaker is DIY the extra power generated by this could make a difference. to overall performance, not much but even 1 or 2 db could be useful.

I have been trying to build some transistor logic gates for a whlle using my old 2n2222a transistors. Having sent for more (50) I have been having a new attempt.

Today I was successful

The circuit is from a book called Getting Started in Electronics – By Forrest M Mimms III, who will be familiar to anyone who remembers Tandy or I would guess any readers out there from the USA

So to start off with I have built an AND gate. I took a photo of the page for inclusion here. (which I guess is ok)

So far this has been built up and tested on a breadboard. It works as the LED only comes on if BOTH switches are pressed. I have now started to work out how to solder this up. Once built I will have at a digital logic circuit which in theory could be used in a classroom to help teach digital logic, this would fit in with the new national curriculum for IT / Computing. I can then move on to building the other circuits that go along side this.

Issues: The circuit sort of works, however if I press button 2 the LED comes on this aparently us due to the LED drawing current from the circuit, if I press button 1 the LED glows brighter.

It seems I need a resistor, between the LED and ground. Hopefully then the led will stay off when both switches are off . I didn’t notice this before on the breadboard as the LED was still glowing very dimly. so only really noticeable in lower light.

So you learn by experience,

If I understand my chat with Speccyman on IRC properly to calculate the resistor you

Vs = Supply voltage

Vd = voltage drop of component

Vc = Vs – Vd

Vc should be the sum of voltages drops across various components I think.

You can then calculate resistor by using ohms law

R= V/I

I am happy to share what I am doing with schools and I would really like to support this new curriculum, some of my other projects should be easy enough for primary level.

If any Torbay based schools have a need for a Teaching Assistant with a more specialist interest in ICT / Computing / Science. I have more experience at primary level but may consider secondary schools too.

I built this in < 30 mins, from the instructions. if you attach the LCD screen to a breadboard (thank you to Tom Brough for soldering the pins on to the LCD board) like I have here make sure when you push the breadboard jump wires in next to the LCD pins they are lined up properly, as in you are connecting the right pins. It is easy to mis-align them.

Anyway once built it scrolls a message on the screen as defined within the code.

The code has also been uploaded to my github repository, however I would suggest you copy directly from the website.

Notes: My 10k potentiometer does not seem to be working properly. I had soldered this on to some 1/4 size protoboard with some pins, the idea being it is easier to connect to the breadboard, which it is. So this fault needs to be looked into. I also soldered a 100k pot for other projects so I may just try that to rule in / out the 10k pot being faulty or badly soldered.

The next step up from this is to connect the HC-SR04 ultra-sonic module to the project and see if it is possible to make a distance measuring device.

Hopefully this will be up and running by the next Tech jam on the 8th August, or at least the Exeter Pi jam. So if you want to see it in action please come along

Errata: OK it seems the 10k pot is working fine. Turns out I had connected the circuit the AREF pin not the ground pin, easy done as they are next to each other. Highlights importance of checking things and if things are not right, check over it again later.